Catheters are routinely used for a variety of medical procedures. Catheters are advanced through a patient's vasculature, often guided by a guide wire. Typically, a guided catheter has a lumened guide wire “inner body”, and an operator first arranges the guide wire and the catheter by inserting a distal end of the guide wire into a proximal end of the inner body of the catheter. The guide wire is passed through the length of the catheter and then inserted into the patient's body through an introducer. The guide wire is advanced through the vasculature until the distal end of the guide wire reaches a target region, for example, a chamber of the heart or a renal artery. The operator then inserts a distal end of the catheter into the introducer and advances the catheter into the patient's vasculature as the catheter rides over the guide wire following the same pathway defined by the guide wire. At the target region, the catheter can be used in a variety of diagnostic and/or therapeutic procedures, including, for example, mapping and ablation in a chamber or tubular region of the heart, and more recently, ablation in the renal region, including renal arteries, for example, for accessing renal nerves to treat hypertension and other ailments and conditions involving the sympathetic renal nerves.
A guide wire is very thin, typically having a diameter ranging between about 0.0135″ and 0.0145″, which can make handling a guide wire, and especially threading a guide wire into a comparably-sized lumen of an inner body, a challenging exercise. Threading a guide wire may be particularly difficult where the guide wire has a floppy atraumatic distal portion with a U-bend configuration. As such, some medical users have resorted to inserting the guide wire into catheter inner body in a “backwards” manner, by inserting a proximal end of the guide wire into a distal end of the inner body to avoid having to manipulate the floppy U-bend of the guide wire.
Accordingly, it is desired that a guide wire insertion aid be configured to facilitate the insertion of a guide wire from its distal end into a proximal end of a guide wire inner body, and that the aid facilitate connection with a syringe or other luer connectors so fluid can be introduced into the lumen of the guide wire inner body as needed or desired.